3.1 Study Areas at Three Scales
(Text transferred from Article I-IV) 3.1.1 Sweden - Africa
The foundation “Insamlingsstiftelsen Vi Planterar Träd” (commonly known as Vi Skogen, (hereafter called ViS) is an international NGO with its headquarter (HQ) in Stockholm, Sweden (see Figure 2). ViS coordinates the Vi Agroforestry Program and was registered as an international NGO in four East African countries: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. ViS is mainly financed by Sida, the Swedish cooperative movement, and over 30,000 private annual donors in Sweden. The decision to plant a forest in Kenya was made in December 1982 (Viklund 1992) by the Vi Magazine. The first article about ViS was published in the Vi Magazine in 1983. Readers were asked to give away trees for any celebration or commemoration to be planted against the spread of the desert in Kenya. The response was overwhelming.
Nearly 2-million SEK was contributed during 1983 (Lundgren, Boëthius &
Nyberg 1995). To use all the collected money became one of the most difficult problems. A local NGO, Faith Home of Kenya (FHK), was
Figure 2, the location of Sida headquarter, Vi Skogen head-quarter and its projects in Africa in 2001
Sida and Vi Skogen Hq
Vi Skogen projects
engaged to raise seedlings to be planted in the semi-arid areas of West Pokot. However, due to weak planning, poor accountability, and lack of focus FHK faced difficulties in coping with the pace of the ViS demands (Viklund 1992). In 1985, a coordinator located in Sweden was employed.
The cooperation with FHK was terminated and at the beginning of 1986, a partnership with Kenya National Farmers Union (KNFU) was initiated.
ViS was registered as an independent NGO in Sweden in 1986 (Viklund 1992, Johansson & Nylund 2008); later, ViS was registered as a local NGO in Kenya, initially using the name Vi Tree-Planting project, which was later renamed to Vi Agroforestry Project. The cooperation between ViS and KNFU, which in practice ended in 1988, was officially terminated in 1990 (Viklund 1992, Lundgren, Boëthius & Nyberg 1995, Johansson &
Nylund 2008). ViS had and still has close and regular communication with its individual donors through ViS articles in the Vi Magazine (Johansson &
Nylund 2008). Journeys to the ViS project(s) were arranged annually for Vi Magazine-readers; this activity started in November 1986. In December 1992, an article published in the ViM presented ViS’s vision of a 20-km green belt of agroforestry around Lake Victoria (Johansson & Nylund 2008). ViS was registered in Uganda 1992 and in Tanzania 1994. At the end of 1996, Sida approved ViS’s organizational set-up with its own local NGOs (Sida/SEKA 1996). ViS continued to reform its policy and organization during the following years (Haldin, Koppers & Auren 2000, Johansson & Nylund 2008, Vi Skogen 1998a, 1998b, 1999), gradually developing into its present organization with its distinctive character and a policy in line with today’s predominant aid ideology, recognized for its efficiency and good results (Johansson & Nylund 2008).
Sida is the Swedish development agency working on behalf of the Swedish parliament and government, with the mission to reduce poverty in the world. In cooperation with others, Sida contributes to the implementation of the Sweden’s Policy for Global Development that will enable poor people to improve their lives. Sida works in a total of 33 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America (Sida 2015).
3.1.2 Vi Agroforestry Project Mara, Tanzania.
The Vi Agroforestry project in the Mara region, Tanzania (Vi-AFP), was a local NGO registered with the Ministry of Home Affairs in Tanzania. The project appraisal was carried out early in 1994. Field activities were initiated with the employment of the first project extension agents (PEA) in the beginning of 1994 (Anon 2001). The target group of the Vi-AFP was the subsistence oriented farmers with unsecure food supply, estimated to
80% of the total population in the lake zone of the Mara Region (Anon 1998). The development objective was to make a substantial contribution towards improved livelihoods of this target group. The project objectives were to increase food and nutritional security, fuel wood availability, and sources of income. The implementation approach used by the project was labelled as; age and gender sensitive participatory agroforestry extension.
The number of project extension agents employed in the project increased from 16 in 1995 to 113 in 2000. At the end of 2000 the project had 155 permanent employees in total (Article I-II, Haldin, Koppers & Auren 2000, Barklund 2004, Anon 1998, Anon 2001).
Figure 3. Location of the Mara region Vi Agroforestry Program project area and its seven project zones (coloured areas) on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria.
Each project extension agent was responsible for a village or part of a village as their specific area of concentration. The project area included 104 villages along the Victoria Lake in Mara divided into 7 subprojects (Zones,
see Figure 3) with about 15 to 16 project extension agents in each. Each zone was led by a zonal manager responsible for its running operations.
The total number of households in the project area in 2001, was approximately 34,500, On average 305 households per area of concentration/project extension agent (Article I-II, Haldin, Koppers &
Auren 2000, Barklund 2004, Anon 1998, Anon 2001).
In an effort to focus on the most useful agroforestry interventions for the small scale farmers, a consolidated package gradually developed in collaboration with farmers, district staff, and ICRAF-Shinyanga (International Centre for Research on Agroforestry, today World of Agroforestry Centre, field station in Shinyanga). The aim was to plant all trees in a way that improved and protected the soil and conserved the water resource. As their common aim was to improve productivity and sustainability of the local farming system; project and government extension services, and ICRAF-Shinyanga joined efforts. The collaboration focused on the integration of sustainable practices in the local subsistence systems of Mara, including agroforestry, improved crop varieties, organic farming, and soil and water conservation. An important part of the collaboration was farmers co-designed learning experiments. In the year 2000, 54 tree species and four improved crop varieties were promoted by the project (Article II and III, Haldin, Koppers & Auren 2000, Barklund 2004, Anon 1998, Anon 2001).
The Mara Region is divided into five districts: Tarime, Bunda, Musoma Rural, Musoma Urban, and Serengeti. The part of the Lake Victoria basin in Tanzania covers 84,920 km², which equals 46% of the total lake catchment area, and includes the Mwanza, Mara, Kagera and Shinyanga regions. The Mara Region is situated along the east side of Lake Victoria.
On average 667 people used one km² of cultivated land for their livelihood in the region (estimate for year 2000; Anon 1998). Most of the lake zone inhabitants are subsistence farmers, cultivating crops, keeping livestock, or fishing. Land pressure and deforestation are increasing rapidly. People in the lake zone are faced with several problems including low and unpredictable agricultural production due to erratic precipitation and soil erosion, increasing poverty coupled with malnutrition, high incidences of disease, and rapid environmental degradation (Article II-II, Anon 1998, Swallow 2009, Odada 2004).
The lake zone is a strip of land about 10 to 15 km wide along the lake including parts of Tarime, Musoma and Bunda Districts at altitudes from 1100 to 1200 m.a.s.l. The annual precipitation is normally less than 900 mm divided in two main seasons, about mid-September to early December
and March to June. Duration of the rainy season is highly variable causing difficulties in predicting the timing of farm operations. This situation for agricultural practices is further aggravated by a commonly occurring mid-season (early December to March) dry spell. Soils in the lake zone are mainly sandy and thus prone to drought, easily exhausted, and susceptible to erosion. In areas that are seasonally waterlogged, the soils consist of heavy clay. Eleven ethnic groups are represented in the lake zone with the Jita, Luo, and Kuria being the largest. Jita and Luo are semi-agropastoralist and Kuria are agro-pastoralists (Anon 1998, Swallow 2009, Odada 2004).
3.1.3 Community Forests in Eastern Africa
Eleven CBFG were selected in five countries, three in Kenya and two in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia (See Figure 4). The age of the selected cases from their foundation to the time of the study varied from 1 to 15 years. The area coverage of the cases ranged from those organised in the local communities to CBFGs organised at the national level.
Figure 4. Map of Eastern Africa and parts of southern Africa presenting 11 cases
The number of organisational levels also varied from an independent CBFG with only one organisational level, to organisations with two levels and organisations with three levels. Organisations with two levels included an apex with a secondary level of local community-based groups. CBFGs with three organisational levels included an intermediate level between the apex and the local groups. Membership in the CBFGs ranged from 34 to 7000. The ways in which the CBFG were initiated varied from a local community initiative, to an initiative co-developed by the local community and an external actor (agency or development organisations). The forest areas managed by the CBFGs ranged in size from 50 to more than 5000 ha.
Land tenure and rights to access and use of the forest were diversesly ranged from individual private property rights to (Bageza), ownership devolved from government to the CBFG in partnership with a parastatal enterprise (Chilalo and Chilimo), customary use rights transferred to the CBFG (Zambia), government-owned and held citizens’ trust (MAFICO), user rights against payment (Kenya) and government ownership devolved to CBFG but with the final agreement pending (Chiwaka and Uwamiru).
Some CBFGs focused on several activities while other had a more narrow focus. For example, the Fikoko co-operative specialised in honey production, while others were engaged in both timber-based activities and several others based on non-timber forest products such as beekeeping, fruit and herb gathering and ecotourism. However, the selected groups shared a purpose, to improve the livelihood of members and the resilience of the natural resource base on which they depend (Article IV).
3.2 Methods
In this thesis, sustainability is understood as the goal for development, often described in official policy. Sustainable development on the other hand is about how stakeholders collaboratively learn to steer towards the goal of sustainability (Baker 2006, see also section 2.1 above) in a landscape. Landscape is a term that includes both the social and ecological dimensions of a place (see Article V and section 2.2 above). Using a landscape approach for development and transdisciplinary research means (1) to work in a landscape as a social and ecological system, (2) to establish collaboration among stakeholders at multiple levels of governance, (3) a commitment to and understanding of the landscape’s sustainability status and development trajectory, (4) to produce new knowledge needed for the process, and (5) that the process result in learning at local, regional, national, and international levels of governance (Article V).
Social sustainability
Ecological sustainability
Economic sustainability Introduction of ideas
My thesis is about the introduction and scaling up process of two approaches to improve landscape resilience, namely agroforestry (Article I – III), and community-based forestry (Article IV). Both agroforestry and community-based forestry aims to increase social, economic, and ecological sustainability. This includes adaptation, integration, and adoption of new organisational and technical interventions into existing subsistence systems, and finally the scaling up of interventions to reach a majority of the target groups, gradually moving towards a resilient landscape.
Figure 5. Three-dimensional model to illustrate (1) a sustainable development process regarding introduction of new ideas, adaptation and integration, leading to adoption and scaling up of agroforestry and community based forestry with (2) the aim to improve social, economic, and ecological sustainability of the local subsistence systems towards (3) a resilient landscapes.
The introduced interventions and the process of adaptation, integration, adoption, and scaling-up can be considered as a sustainable development process that gradually improves economic, social, and ecological sustainability of the local subsistence systems, thus progressively navigating towards a more resilient landscape (Figure 5).
a) Ecological sustainability is assumed to improve with an increasing proportion of the population integrating sustainable land management practices in their subsistence system. The process is coordinated in time, space and pattern aptly at different levels in the landscape to increase connectivity and rainwater infiltration for enhanced biodiversity, soil and water conservation - moving towards an ecosystem increasingly capable to maintain itself against disturbance and stress (Adger 2000). This implies to gradually turn the degrading interaction between subsistence activities and the natural capital found among many food insecure communities, to sustainable development (Scherr 2000, Elasha et al. 2005)
b) Social sustainability is assumed to improve with an increasing number of the food insecure households being empowered through a collaborative learning process (Keen, Brown & Dyball 2005, Wals 2009, Daniels & Walker 2001, Cheng & Fiero 2005). The process expand and improve their social capital and organisational capability to influence the rules and relationships that govern their lives and the ways in which resources are controlled and transformed in their society (Sen 1997 Bebbington 1999). As the process progressively builds a capacity to withstand external stress from social, economic, political (Adger 2000) and ecological change social sustainability improve.
c) Economic sustainability is assumed to improve with the improved technical, entrepreneurial, and organisational capability among an increasing number of the food insecure households. They gradually improve productivity, income stability, and economic sustainability of their subsistence system (Chambers & Conway 1992, Bebbington 1999, Elasha et al 2005), moving towards a capacity to confront economic changes and risks (WRI 2008).
Barriers and bridges to the scaling up process were identified in Article I-IV from introduction to scaling up with focus on those critical for the food insecure households. Their specific (in the Result and Discussion section) and general (in the General Discussion section) influence on the scaling up process was analysed on the scaling up process per se, and the prospect to improve economic, social and ecological sustainability of the local subsistence systems and navigation towards a resilient landscape.
3.3 Methods Used in the Articles
(Text transferred from Articles I-IV) 3.3.1 Analysing Negotiation Processes, Article I
Inspired by Allison (1971), Elmore (1978) and Elgström (1992), three analytical concepts, the power, organizational, and contextual approaches, were used as explanatory categories when analysing the empirical material of the negotiation process between ViS and Sida. Each approach places the focus on a particular set of variables. Thus, three separate explanatory perspectives are presented. These could be viewed as mutually exclusive theories; however, the three approaches are considered as supplementing perspectives, each highlighting some particular aspects of the bargaining process. (1) The power approach argues that the power of the actors involved in the negotiation is the main determinant of bargaining behaviour and results. The distribution of material power resources is one essential dimension of power, and the presence of influential norms is another. (2) The organizational approach claims that it is crucial to study factors pertaining to characteristics of the organization of both negotiating parties, such as organizational culture and capacity. (3) The contextual approach argues that knowledge about the context of the negotiation episode is vital for the understanding of bargaining process and result (Article I).
3.3.2 Analysing Scaling up, Article II and III
To analyse the scaling up process of agroforestry in the Mara Region, a number of different methods were used. To establish a robust base 21 households were selected, randomly drawn from a list including all households in each of the 89 villages included in the study. This resulted in a total sample of 1869 households. Surviving agroforestry trees were counted in each household/farm divided into age and type of tree (soil improver, long-term trees, and fruit trees). Five response variables were constructed from this data (see Table 1). Each of the selected households were interviewed using a structured questionnaire. Effect variables describing village, division/zonal and district means, and characteristics were calculated from the household data and collected from maps, project documents, government records, and structured interviews with project staff representing different subsystems (see Table 2).
Table 1. Dependent variables used in the analyses of the scaling up process of Agroforestry in Mara Region, Tanzania
Abbr. Description of variable
Sr1-30 No of sample households with 1 to 30 agroforestry trees/soil-improvers (3 m soil-improvement hedge = 1 tree) surviving on their farm
Sr≥40 No of sample households with 40 or more agroforestry trees/soil-improvers (3 m soil-improvement hedge = 1 tree) surviving on their farm
Sp≥5 No of households with 5 or more surviving agroforestry-tree species of the species promoted by the project
SrX Average number of agroforestry-trees / soil-improvers surviving per sample household in a village, i.e. the total number of surviving trees divided by all 21 sample household
SrS The accumulated total number of seasons from which the 21 sample household was found to have surviving agroforestry trees
Table 2. Independent variables and factors affecting agroforestry adoption differentiated into five social and ecological subsystems
Subsystems of
adoption Factor Variables
i Local
ii Local belief Perceptions related to trees and agroforestry
Perceived labour require-ment of tree establishment, tree ownership and the benefits of agroforestry trees
iii Physical environment
Characteristics of soil and water
Main soil type, water sources and distance to the lake
v Project Project interventions Level, duration and type of project activities and characteristics of the project extension agent
A correlation analysis (Shork & Remington 2000) was first made to map the relationship among the variables included in the study using Pearson’s
correlation criteria. After correlation, the influence of the 26 independent variables on adoption were analysed, using multiple linear regression and the stepwise procedure with the probability criteria of F to enter set at 0.150 and F to remove set at 0.150. The main reason to use multiple regression analysis is to learn more about the relationship between several independent variables and a response variable (dependent variable) (Hair et al 1998, Mardia, Kent & Bibby 1982). From the models produced by the stepwise procedure the model with the largest number of variables and the highest R2 was selected for each response (Shork & Remington 2000, Draper & Smith 1966, Olsson 2011, Atkinson 1981).
Single ANOVA analysis was conducted to test if the differences among administrative districts and divisions/project zones were significantly separated in terms of the dependent variables used in Article II. Secondly, district and zonal means were calculated for the dependent and independent variables. Tukey‘s test was used for pair-wise comparisons to determine if these means were significantly separated between the different levels of districts and project zones. Thirdly, fitted line-plots were used with the district or project zone as a categorical variable to determine if the influence of the independent variables (presented in Table 1 and in Article II) on project outcome (the five dependent variables) were neutral, positive or negative among the different levels of districts and zones.
Finally, a qualitative method was used for the analysis of data collected using participatory observations, and official and internal project documents ranging from meeting protocols, project accounts, notes, and documented discussions among project staff and project partners. Our analysis included the following iterative steps; (1) reading of the data material; (2) structuring of the dataset and writing; (3) discussions about what was written, which included the descriptive models of the chronology of change and considering differences among districts and zones; (4) discussions and reflections on the text and the models; (5) to confirm and validate the qualitative analyses comparing with quantitative results; (6) trying to falsify our findings using the same dataset; (7) relate the results with similar scholarly work. Then, we went back through the steps several more times to assure that all our findings were well grounded in the data (Glasser & Strauss 2008).
Collaboration was assessed in terms of regular or occasional interaction, and whether the interest to collaborate was one-way or two-way, giving four levels: (i) occasional interaction with one-way interest to collaborate;
(ii) occasional interaction with two-way interest to collaborate; (iii) regular
interaction with one-way efforts to collaborate; (iv) regular interaction with two-way efforts to collaborate (Article III).
interaction with one-way efforts to collaborate; (iv) regular interaction with two-way efforts to collaborate (Article III).